What Are We Going to Do?

Terraform and Kubernetes#

We won’t go into an in-depth comparison between Terraform and other solutions. Instead, the goal is to provide you with quick know-how so you can decide whether a tool or a process is the right choice for your needs. So, let’s dive straight into hands-on Terraform exercises.

We’ll create a fully operational Kubernetes cluster defined in such a way that it’s “production ready.” We’ll establish the base knowledge required for us to work with it and, more importantly, to decide whether the tool and the processes behind it are the right choice for our needs.

Kubernetes and the big three#

We’ll explore Terraform through practical and real-world examples and use it to create a Kubernetes cluster in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure. Those are the three most commonly used hosting vendors. It’s important to note that it doesn’t matter whether we’re planning to use Kubernetes or if we’d like to use Terraform to manage something else. A Kubernetes cluster is just a means to an end. The primary goal is to dive into Terraform.

It would be great to go through all three platforms to get additional insights into each. That might clarify some doubts about the pros and cons of choosing one of the “big three.” Nevertheless, that’s not mandatory. It’s OK to just choose one (or two) and skip researching the rest. Just note that the structure is the same and that parts of the informational texts are similar. That might sound boring. However, the goal is to keep the same structure so they can be compared easily.